Dallas streetcar fare was 7 cents in 1938

We’ve been interviewing a lot of old-timers for the November Advocate, and one of them is Lynn Guilloud, who hailed from a farm in far North Texas and attended Texas A&M University.

Guilloud was a “poor boy” who landed in College Station in 1938 with $68 in his pocket and a lead on a place to stay — a student flop house with bunks stacked three high, 23 miles from campus.

“The guy in the top bunk had to be careful not to sit up, or he would hit his head on the ceiling,” Guilloud says.

He hitched a ride on an open cattle truck from Navasota to campus every day. And when he went home — for Christmas break and summer only — he hitchhiked.

The only thing that cost money, he says, was taking the streetcar across Dallas. He would catch it in Oak Cliff and pay 7 cents to get through downtown to North Dallas, where he would hang a thumb.

Once, he had a hard time catching rides and got to Dallas late at night, after the streetcars stopped running. It was difficult to get picked up in the city because there weren’t that many cars, so he walked from Oak Cliff to North Dallas — which was probably about Uptown or Highland Park at the time. He got there by daybreak and caught a ride to his folks’ home near Dennison.

He got to save his 7 cents that time.

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